Pret A Manger opened at Melrose Arch on 14 February 2025, the brand's first store on the African continent. Eighteen months later it has three, and all of them are in Johannesburg.
That is not a scandal. It is a useful measurement, and it is available to anyone willing to count sites instead of reading announcements.
Who owns it, in two layers
The layers matter, because they are often reported as one thing.
Globally, Pret is majority owned by JAB Holding, the Luxembourg investment vehicle of Germany's Reimann family, which bought it for £1.5bn in 2018 and holds roughly 80%. Pret ran about 697 shops worldwide as of April 2024. In June 2025 JAB engaged advisers to weigh a sale or a listing.
In South Africa, the business is run by the Millat Group. Pret's own South African site says so in its footer: the local operation is "owned and managed by the Millat Group". Millat is a Johannesburg family office that took the exclusive national licence in February 2024, a development agreement giving it the sole right to operate Pret stores across the country.
Millat is not a restaurant family. It holds the exclusive South African licence for Circle K, operates Hyatt House hotels in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and runs the dark kitchen brands Dhaba and Gimba. It is a brand importer, and Pret is one line in that portfolio.
Three stores, and one of them is a canteen
The three are Melrose Arch, The Zone at Rosebank, and one at 1 Discovery Place in Sandton.
The third is worth separating from the other two. It sits inside Discovery's head office and trades Monday to Friday, 6am to 5pm. No weekends. That is a captive workplace site serving a single employer's staff, and it tells you very little about whether the format works on a South African high street. On the evidence of the store finder, Pret has two trading sites in this market and one staff canteen.
The cities that were named
At signing, the plan reported was Johannesburg first, then Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria "over the coming months", against a ten-year build. Pret's chief executive Pano Christou called it "a major milestone in our international expansion". Millat's chief executive Hamza Farooqui said the deal was "in line with Millat's strategy of bringing global brands into South Africa".
Eighteen months on, the coming months have not arrived. There is no Cape Town store, no Durban store and no Pretoria store.
Nothing about that is unusual or improper. Ten years is the stated horizon and a licensee is entitled to build slowly. The point is narrower and more practical: the city list in a launch announcement is a statement of intent, and intent is not a pipeline. It was reported at the time, and repeated since, as though it were a schedule.
You cannot buy one
This is the part most often got wrong, because an international brand arriving gets written up as a franchise story.
There is no Pret franchise offer to South African operators. Millat holds the national licence. You cannot buy a territory, you cannot buy a store, and there is no disclosure document to read, because nothing is being sold to you.
If you have seen Pret's arrival cited as evidence that international franchise opportunities are opening up here, the citation is wrong. One company acquired one licence.
The scale question
Set against what is actually happening in South African coffee, three stores is a rounding error.
The formats are not the same and the comparison is unfair on those terms. Pret is a food-led premium proposition, Vida is a coffee-led network with a far lower cost of entry. But operators do not lose customers to a category definition. They lose them to the shop that opened down the road, and on that measure the imported premium brand is not the thing moving the market. Bootlegger plans 30 stores this year and Seattle is opening about 40 a year. That is where the catchment pressure comes from.
What to take from it
The most valuable thing about Pret's first eighteen months here is the method, not the brand.
- Count sites, not press releases. Store finders are published, dated and free. They are the cheapest audit available to you.
- Separate captive sites from trading sites. One of Pret's three does not compete for public footfall.
- Read city lists as intent. Three named cities, eighteen months, no stores.
- Check who holds the licence before treating an arrival as an opportunity. Usually it is one holder, and usually it is not for sale.
We will update the count here as sites open, dated, rather than quietly editing the number.
